Alan Wake Preorder £33.95 @ Zavvi [XBox 360 Games]

Anyone who has been looking forward to this game since it first reared up on the horizon in 2005 must have the most fidgety of ants in their pants right now, thanks to Alan Wake's upcoming May release. So now is the time to start shopping around for the best preorder deals.

Thanks to their new promotional code, Zavvi's already winning deals are now even cheaper, beating the competition for both the normal and special editions. The next best price for the normal version from Cool Shop. The next best for £39.99 from Amazon.

To knock an extra £3 off the price of either version, use the voucher code: MVC3

The Limited Edition offers an exclusive in-game audio commentary with hints from Remedy, "The Alan Wake Files"—a 144 page book which compiles the FBI dossiers covering the events in Bright Falls and includes a short story by Alan Wake, an exclusive soundtrack CD, a token allowing you to download the first DLC pack from XBL and an Alan Wake XBox Live Theme and Avatar. It all comes wrapped in fancy schmancy linen-bound packaging, intended to resemble a hardbound book.

You've probably picked up on the outline of the plot in the five years that it has taken for this game to reach us but just in case you're in need of a refresher: Alan Wake is a best selling psychological thriller author (modelled after real-life Finnish writer, Ilkka Villi) who has been wrestling with a very sore case of writer's block for two years. In an attempt to help him through the block, his fiancee, Alice, takes him to a small forest town called (not Silent Hill but) Bright Falls. However this plan goes painfully awry when Alice vanishes and Alan discovers that he predicted this turn of events in a novel he doesn't even recall writing.

The story unwraps in an episodic manner, apparently with a TV-show feel to its presentation and the game itself has been confirmed as only one season of a bigger overarching narrative.

All the previews suggest that this will be a visually arresting game and that the world of Bright Falls is brought to life superbly, with shifts in the light and weather changing the town and its inhabitants, in ways both subtle and profound. These changes can be tools to use to your advantage, as light itself is an essential element in combat. Enemies, known as "The Taken" gather power from the darkness and are highly sensitive to light, meaning that your torch will often be the most important weapon at your disposal and encouraging a tactical approach in which you work with the environment to vanquish your foes.

After such a long wait and so much shuffling around, it's hard to predict whether Alan Wake will live up to its miasma of hype or not but it certainly sounds intriguing, so here's hoping.